I didn't read comic books much growing up. I wanted to read 'serious' books about fairies and ghosts and how 'mysteriousness' was imbued in everything. I started reading Chris Claremont's X-Men issues while I learned as a university freshman to misbehave. I vaguely recall that, during the month-long personal episode when I was trying to write my senior thesis on Thomas Nashe's _Lenten Stuffe_---which all seemed too magnificently satirical and enormously contemporaneous and generally too big get on with---I took time to re-read all the Chris Claremont X-Men arcs I had. And also all the New Mutants, especially, the Alan Davis/ Chris Claremont New Mutants Annual 2 with its crossover to the X-Men annual. Clearly, if Chris Claremont had a rep for talking too much, I didn't notice. ---It wasn't The Dark Knight but, rather, reading one issue of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol that changed my landscape.
I don't think I realized that Claremont was as verbose and over-explanatory until much later either. He really kept me hooked into comics at a point when I was starting to drift out of them because he found a way to imbue some real personality and depth into routine comic plotting and then also because he so thoroughly took on board the subplotting structure of soap operas. Wolk talks about that one magical month where the early Marvel comics referenced each other, and a bit about how the "mutant metaphor" needed Claremont to give it real depth, but I do think Claremont generally took the idea of Marvel intertextuality to a whole new level. There was this moment I remember in the first time Arcade appeared in X-Men where Spider-Man spots Scott Summers walking around with Colleen Wing, swings down to catch up a bit with them, takes off and then hears Arcade's capture-truck and swings back, realizing what's happened. That went way beyond "Marvel comics are interconnected"--it was Claremont juggling subplots across multiple books, pushing forward stories of side characters that he had developed a custodial sensibility about, etc.
I didn't read comic books much growing up. I wanted to read 'serious' books about fairies and ghosts and how 'mysteriousness' was imbued in everything. I started reading Chris Claremont's X-Men issues while I learned as a university freshman to misbehave. I vaguely recall that, during the month-long personal episode when I was trying to write my senior thesis on Thomas Nashe's _Lenten Stuffe_---which all seemed too magnificently satirical and enormously contemporaneous and generally too big get on with---I took time to re-read all the Chris Claremont X-Men arcs I had. And also all the New Mutants, especially, the Alan Davis/ Chris Claremont New Mutants Annual 2 with its crossover to the X-Men annual. Clearly, if Chris Claremont had a rep for talking too much, I didn't notice. ---It wasn't The Dark Knight but, rather, reading one issue of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol that changed my landscape.
I don't think I realized that Claremont was as verbose and over-explanatory until much later either. He really kept me hooked into comics at a point when I was starting to drift out of them because he found a way to imbue some real personality and depth into routine comic plotting and then also because he so thoroughly took on board the subplotting structure of soap operas. Wolk talks about that one magical month where the early Marvel comics referenced each other, and a bit about how the "mutant metaphor" needed Claremont to give it real depth, but I do think Claremont generally took the idea of Marvel intertextuality to a whole new level. There was this moment I remember in the first time Arcade appeared in X-Men where Spider-Man spots Scott Summers walking around with Colleen Wing, swings down to catch up a bit with them, takes off and then hears Arcade's capture-truck and swings back, realizing what's happened. That went way beyond "Marvel comics are interconnected"--it was Claremont juggling subplots across multiple books, pushing forward stories of side characters that he had developed a custodial sensibility about, etc.